Miami/Florida special – a wonderfully weird paradise

South Beach, Miami

Florida Keys

Port Orange

Miami is one of those cities that is hard to describe in just a few words. The beauty of Miami certainly starts with its diversity and exclusive ambience. It seems like Miami was made on the eighth day when all the eccentrics from around the world were invited to make it a wonderfully weird paradise. Miami sits in another reality that starts at the Florida Everglades and extends through a wonderland of sand, sun, bright colors and brilliant creativity. Even with the humidity, mosquitoes and alligators, Miami is impossibly sexy, enormously romantic and downright irresistible.

Everglades, Florida

Florida, more civilized than it once was, is still seductively and unnervingly fluid. Miami continues to be washed with wave after wave of Latin immigrants, and the city vibrates with energy and culture and change. The Deep South of northern Florida lovingly tends its memories, even as old ways fade or are simply paved over. The phantasmagorical theme parks continue to weave their mechanical magic. And just off the coast, another hurricane is always brewing.

Walt Disney was right:
Florida is a place that captures the imagination. The landscape is exaggerated and invites exaggeration. Spanish explorers saw manatees and imagined they were mermaids; Ponce de León saw a crystal-clear spring and imagined it was a fountain of youth. Developers saw swamps and sold them as paradise, but if they are, there’s plenty of the devil in them. In its history, Florida has inspired as much madness and murder as it has fantasies of a magical kingdom where dreams really do come true.

So come for the beaches and Mickey Mouse, come for the people and the Everglades, come for the nightlife and the kayaking and the manatees and the gators. But make sure to come. Because Florida is always stranger than you imagine, and it never holds still.

found on lonelyplanet.com
found on visitflorida.com